This one has been in my “to-play” list for, well, since it originally came out for the Nintendo DS back in 2010. I was a kid that had access to an R4 card and an internet connection and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was one of hundreds of games I beamed straight to my DS. I’m a huge Phoenix Wright fan so I can tell you why exactly it took me so long to play the beloved cult classic in Shu Takumi’s lineage, but what I can tell you is I don’t like it very much!

Look, I’m sorry, I know Ghost Trick is beloved. People love Lynne! They love Missile the dog! I’m sorry to say that despite thinking Missile is very cute I don’t particularly care for either of them. See - I am somewhat confused by the reaction to Ghost Trick critically, as I seem to have the inverse problem as most other contemporaneous critics: the story just doesn’t do anything for me. It’s not the Takumi goofiness, that’s fine, it’s that I don’t particularly like any of the characters, and most of the scenes feel as though they’re leaning into Takumi’s worst character writing instincts. My least favorite part of the Phoenix Wright games has always been the investigations, because a lot of the games’ “humor” comes from throwing larger-than-life, intentionally annoying caricatures at you. The designs are fun, sure, and several of the characters are endearing, but I always appreciated the character work and drama that came from the court room sections over the more slapstick investigative sections. The story, in Ghost Trick, feels made entirely of the types of Phoenix Wright characters I enjoy least - the broad, overblown gag characters with nonsense quirks and repetitive animations, and I find it impossible to truly attach myself to any of them.

What I like most about Ghost Trick, or at least, what I see the most potential in, is the puzzle design. I think the central mechanic of jumping between pieces of a diorama to experiment with different interactions is really enticing. It doesn’t always work, and of course there are the leaps in logic of how things might actually interact, but there’s some really satisfying moments seeing a Rube Goldberg machine of seemingly disconnected set pieces come together in some fantastical or ridiculous way to accomplish a seemingly simple objective. It’s what I think is so tragic about Ghost Trick’s lack of financial success and certainty that there will never be a sequel: a chance to expand on these mechanics, perhaps even including an actual physics system or puzzle design that allows for greater mechanical expression or multiple solutions would be absolutely stellar.

It truly is a shame that Ghost Trick only found its audience as cult game (I am of course, one of the many people to blame for this), because I do think it’s interesting, I just need someone to wrangle in some of these characters and expand on what’s truly great about it.

As a person with minimal online presence and an even smaller following (a couple friends read my stuff, I’m mutuals with a couple writers I deeply admire online who may also happen to click through - hi guys!) it’s never really made a lot of “sense” for me to do any of this, but I enjoy the ritual of combing through the year and reflecting on the art I enjoyed. If I were a better writer or a sharper critic, I would probably tackle film, books, or music, but alas, what I know is video games, and what I kinda know how to write about is video games. This preface might sound a bit more self-antagonistic than I mean it to. I think my insecurity lies in that, the nature of having written a “top ten” makes me come off as though I think that I have the kind of prestige that means people will care what my top ten is. It’s all just a bit of fun.

10: Atomfall (Rebellion Developments)

Clearly heavily inspired by Bethesda’s take on the Fallout series, Atomfall is much more than “what if Fallout were British”. I knew the game was something special when it eschewed objectives altogether. After a brief intro sequence, the player exits a bunker on a mysterious quarantined section of the British Countryside, with only the notion that they must access something called The Interchange and that “Oberon must die.” Instead of map markers and quest journals and lists of objectives, the player is given only leads to follow, things that may or may not lead them into The Interchange, or on a collision course with one of the areas many faction leaders with their own goals and ends. The game allows you to build your own relationships with the factions based on when and where you encountered them, whether or not you met their leaders first, or if you even gathered all possible information before making a snap decision. I myself became a staunch enemy of the military faction of the game when I wandered into a restricted area, assuming that all military NPCs were immediately hostile. Not true, I found, after researching different possible endings later. I had simply stumbled into them at the wrong place at the wrong time and decided to acquaint them with the business end of a shoddy, rusted revolver that I had pilfered off a corpse in a river moments before.

Even the trading system is impressive, foregoing any currency and heading straight to bartering. Different NPCs value different items, and will consider items more or less personally valuable depending on how many they have, and how many you are selling them during this specific transaction. If I give you three grenades, well, now you have three grenades. Do you really need a fourth grenade? The bartender at this military occupied village doesn’t seem to think he does. It’s such a breath of fresh air to see a team considering a change in open world scrounge-em-ups and taking a more systems-forward approach to design philosophy.

9: Eclipsium (Housefire)

I dare not spoil its best moments here, but to play Eclipsium is to feel as though you’re wandering through the cutscene of a lost Sega CD game. The visuals are intentionally chunky so as to obscure detail and create as much mood as possible. The first thing you do in Eclipsium is slice out your tongue. You won’t need words where you’re going. It contains massive tonal swings that are woven together expertly, shifting from scene to scene in a dreamlike haze, as our protagonist literally pulls themselves apart to complete their goal. The ending section is almost as funny as it is gruesome - the protagonist pulling their own ribs out to use as climbing anchors. All the body horror is a fantastic contrast to the swelling synth tour of the world, elevating a somewhat traditional walking simulator to a gripping folk horror tale about self-sacrifice, change, and the rattle of machines so great and terrible that, even far away, they shake our foundations. I completed it in a single sitting, unable to leave it be for even a moment.

8: Stray Children (Onion Games)

We’ve reached the ouroboros point - developer Onion Games (a studio with a legendary lineage of games, including Moon: Remix RPG, Chulip, and Rule of Rose) has released a spiritual successor to Moon: Remix RPG fully pulling from the very games they inspired. Sometimes frustrating, Stray Children is a game about touring another’s nostalgia, navigating a confusing strange world through the eyes of a child. The music, presentation, are a warm bath for anyone with memories of mid-90s Playstation adventure/RPG video games. The puzzle design is enigmatic - seemingly unrelated items and text found in the early hours will become relevant tens of hours later. You’re as sure to find deep lore down a secondary path as you are to find it buried behind several loops of a maze. Stray Children is as much about missing out as it as about picking through the remnants of a time you can no longer understand. It’s brave and messy and heart-wrenching.

7: Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion (Bubby Darkstar)

I think there’s a dangerous trend of applauding small numbers of developers in studios that made games in 2025. When talked about by enthusiasts it’s usually said with awe, but it seems to have become yet another tool for marketing tactic, to either erase work or create some sort of anti-worker prestige about the magic of making games. In any case, the fact that Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is, as far as I can tell, mostly the work of one person, blows me the hell away. I can’t think of the last time I played a game with animation so expressive, with jokes so punchy, all with such strong voice. It’s a Klasky-Csupo roundhouse kick of horny, explosive, parkour shootin’ and it’s an absolute blast. The game allows you to continue to look around during dialogue and uses this for punchlines several times and it’s always a slam dunk. Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is a masterstroke of an artist and game designer with tons of a bite and a bone to pick. It’s feisty as hell and deserved at least ten times the attention it got. Having played this feels like stumbling upon a gorgeous secret I want to share with the world. Go pick it up and give it a spin before everyone finds it - you get to be the cool kid who found the punk rock thing before it was cool.

6: ROUTINE (Lunar Software)

I kinda can’t believe that Routine actually exists. I remember watching the original trailer back in 2013 and coming away slack-jawed at how creepy and atmospheric is. The devs, Lunar Software, went silent for a bit, Alien: Isolation came out the next year and gave me a lot of what I had been looking for in Routine’s original haunted retro-tech halls, but I still held it in my heart. Over the course of the next few years, there’d be an occasional “we’re not dead” update, but I started to lose hope. It wasn’t until it re-appeared in 2022 at Summer Games Fest that it felt real this time, oh man, it was finally happening! Then they went dark again. It finally launched this year, and what a treat to report that it’s not only good, but it’s one of my favorite games of the year.

I am surprised at how much of Routine’s personality from that original trailer twelve years ago is still here. According to an interview on Remap Radio, Routine has changed dramatically since that initial inception, but the vision is so strong its survived all these years and coalesced into something better than I could have imagined. “Immersion” is a sort of meaningless world in a lot of games criticism because what “immerses” a player can be so objective - but in Routine it’s the name of the game. There’s so much physicality to the space and to the body of the player character that it’s impossible not to feel attached. Once you begin playing, the game never ejects you from the world. You’re never given a break, the menu button doesn’t even pause the game. You have to choose to leave Routine, otherwise you remain trapped in its dark, silent halls. It has, possibly, my favorite mechanical touch in a video game ever: your primary tool and mode of defense is your Cosmonaut Assistance Tool or C.A.T. Every button on the C.A.T. can be pressed to change modes, reload batteries, etc. My favorite part? It has a power button. You can panic and misclick and turn your main tool off in the middle of being chased by a murderous android. Genius.

5: Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry)

What can I possibly say about Hollow Knight: Silksong that a thousand other writers haven’t? It’s good, man. It’s among the most polished games I’ve ever played, which makes it feel like Team Cherry really wasn’t joking that they’ve truly been spending all of this time having fun making the best game they possibly could. You can disagree with the design decisions, the runbacks, the difficulty, the pacing, etc. One thing you can’t criticize is that it’s incredible what a lot of money and a lot of time and correct scope can do for how good a game feels to play. I only wish that every development studio got a chance to do what Team Cherry did.

4: Beyond Citadel (doekuramori)

It’s weird to say that my fourth favorite game of the year is something that I’m hesitant to recommend in polite company, or someone who doesn’t know me very well. Beyond Citadel is about the closest thing to an ero-guro fetish game one can get without actually going there, even if the creator says that it isn’t that. Beyond Citadel is an unholy fusion of classic build engine shooters, Blame!, and a little bit of Evangelion for good measure, and it’s deeply interested in weapons. Despite the fast pace of the game, every gun requires several button inputs to properly reload, cock, and prepare to fire. Mispressing a key can cause you to fumble a magazine to the ground, eject a perfectly good bullet prematurely, or even find yourself mulched by the very explosive you meant to send towards your enemies. The game is also deeply interested in what a bullet does to a human body, and the horrifying eroticism of that kind of penetration. A gunfight in Beyond Citadel is frantic, loud, graphic, and wet. To walk around afterwords is to see the heaving bodies of anime women, gasping and struggling to breath, the last bit of light leaking from their eyes, armor destroyed to reveal uncomfortable amounts of the bodies below. The collectibles in each stage are usually erotic art that involves the characters, but also tells you pieces of the story. The eroticism in Beyond Citadel is part of its identity, creating a deeply uncomfortable relationship to you and the trail of destruction you leave with your guns, and not in a corny “what if violence were bad” kind of way.

3: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (Jump Over the Age)

I adored Citizen Sleeper, adored its parting question of what it means to “grow vast and strange.” I never expected the follow-up to explore that so thoroughly, to take the “no fail” design of the original and throw it out the window completely, to make the risks higher and the characters more empathetic, and yet, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a titanic sequel. It’s everything I ever could have hoped for for the follow-up of one of my all-time favorites, clearing the original in my mind in nearly every way. I could spend thousands of words telling you about why Citizen Sleeper 2 is such an achievement, but in the interest of brevity I will tell you my favorite story that happened to me in the game:

My Sleeper and my crew had found a group of colonists, and among them was another sleeper: Flint. Flint, like my sleeper, is on the run and carries the weight of having cashed out too many favors, relied on the kindness of strangers one too many times, and now finds himself crushed with guilt as he has put another colonist in danger. He asks us to head to a facility to deal with the person hunting him once and for all, to put this behind him and pay back his debts to the colony he now calls home. After reaching the facility, my crew and my sleeper work tirelessly to turn the traps set by the hunter against them, pushing ourselves to our very breaking point in a mad scramble to eek out a victory against a physically superior and cunning foe. In the very last action, I use a “stress” ability (the game allows you to push yourself beyond what your body can handle in exchange for a better roll) despite the fact that my sleeper doesn’t have the physical resources to handle it. My sleeper manages to physically keep an opening for Flint to escape a hatch that traps the hunter inside, but it proves too much for their body - it shorts out, and they die. Temporarily, of course, they’re brought back online by the ship’s mechanic, but they now carry a permanent scar - death in Citizen Sleeper 2 means one of your dice (you complete actions via rolling specific dice) becomes glitched, meaning it always has a chance of failing, no matter how well you roll. For the next several hours, I failed lots of tasks because of this, I cursed my choice to take it on, it sometimes feels too big of a burden to bear to see the kind of results I want - and yet I never feel even the slightest temptation to reload a save. The idea of becoming permanently disabled, of permanently taking on a new burden to save another added such texture and richness to the story I was telling with the game. I will remember it always, I will keep it in mind as I grow.

2: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Prouductions)

It was always going to be this way - I was always going to love Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Kojima Productions’ latest is the most recent project lead by Hideo Kojima himself, a man who has informed so much of my taste it sometimes feels like I’m about as corny as he is. It’s ridiculous and stupid as his games always are, but Death Stranding 2: On the Beach feels like the most personal work Kojima has made in a long time - it’s still got his trademark masturbatory self-referential wankery, his weird attitude towards women (in fact, this may be among the worst he’s ever been in that regard? And that includes the game where a woman must be… naked to breathe… sigh), and yes his stilted dialogue that doesn’t sound the slightest bit natural no matter how hard Lea Seydoux tries to sell it (and boy, is she trying in this game, even more so than the original Death Stranding). However, Death Stranding 2 is also a game about a man’s alienation from his children, of turning around to find them having grown, unaware of the time that has passed him by. It’s unflinching in its depiction of grief, of the systems of violence and imperialism and the way these alienate us more than pandemic or cataclysm.

Mechanically, it’s the most expressive he’s been since 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and even though it treads a lot of the same ground as Death Stranding, the world is beautifully recontextualized. It’s a safe sequel in lots of ways, and daring in so many others. Despite all his shortcomings, I do think that Hideo Kojima and his team are among the most over and underrated artists out there, and easily one of the most interesting collective of creative voices working today.

1: Silent Hill f (Neobards Entertainment Ltd.)

No one is more surprised than me how much I adored Silent Hill f. Looking at the preview footage of the game, it looked, frankly, like a mess, and even with the writing chops of Ryukishi07, I simply didn’t have the hope that it would bear any fruit. It wasn’t until the critical reception seemed to be “terrifying, yet with clunky combat, the perfect 7/10”, that I found myself interested. I’ve written about my feelings on it at length, but to put a point on it, Silent Hill f is a triumph of horror story-telling - a deeply resonant and empathetic work about the societal roles that alienate us from ourselves and from each other. It’s such a breath of fresh air from a series that I had assumed was completely gone for good, after I had a somewhat middling reaction to the Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team and the series had more or less been on ice since 2019’s P.T., barring the truly abysmal Silent Hill: Ascension and the lackluster “Short Message”. Silent Hill f is the most the series has felt like itself since Silent HIll 3, unpacking a deep societal rot through the lens of a character who, despite what they may have done, probably doesn’t deserve all this. It’s a game about suffering; graphic, deep suffering, that never feels cruel towards its characters, giving them each a deep respect and humanity. Sure the combat is a bit tiresome, but all to a purpose, building to a crescendo of righteous rage and a conclusion of quiet, hopeful reflection. It is a gentle hacksaw, and absolutely my game of the year.

Honorable Mentions

Demonschool (Necrosoft Games)

I adore Demonschool. I adore Faye, its fighting dipshit protagonist. I adore the music. I adore most of the cast and the design and the mood and its Into The Breach meets Shin Megami Tensei: Persona combat. I do wish it were about ten hours shorter.

Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works)

Kaizen game works had another banger on their hands this year, though I feel the scope of the game just barely exceeds its grasp. Despite how much I enjoyed my time with this, its also hard to feel like the narrative chops just aren’t up to snuff with what I know they’re capable of after Paradise Killer. That said, extremely worth your time, front-to-back incredible game.

Skate Story (Sam Eng)

I just haven’t had time to finish this one yet, I’m sorry, I don’t think I will get to it before the year is over! I love what I’ve played so far to the point that I will probably write a whole thing about it when I finish!

Repose (Bozó Attila Bertold)

Creepy, engaging, and downright brutal at times. A short, not so sweet nightmare dungeon crawler with some fascinating mechanics and killer vibes. This one was just barely edged out of my top ten this year, but like every other honorable mention here it’s one-hundred percent banger.

“Really? No Clair Obscure: Expedition 33?”

I loved that game! You can read all about why I didn’t include it here!

If The House in Fata Morgana is about tearing down facades, the prequel, subtitled A Requiem for Innocence, is about constructing them. Released after the original game as a companion piece and an additional entry in the console release collection (Dreams of the Revenants), A Requiem for Innocence focuses on one specific story from the end of the original title, but delves deep into the daily lives of the characters and tragedy that kicked off the events of the main game. It’s harrowing stuff, easily one of the darkest chapters of the original game, there is no happy ending for any of the characters here. As the player likely knows, the entire cast is doomed to meet a terrible end, and the game is content with simply ending at that moment, giving you none of the relief provided in the original entry.

The writing here is still excellent and the cast of characters, both new and familiar, act as excellent thematic foils to each other, but the main issue weighing the game down is how unnecessary all of it starts to feel. The deuteragonists, Morgana and Jacopo, are certainly given more room to breathe here. They were critical characters in the original game, but given the structure and storytelling, they were not given nearly as much screen time as some of the other cast. That said, while their expanded inner workings here do make this all just a bit more tragic, I’m not sure that it strengthens the original narrative or provides a truly comparing one on its own.

The core issue here is structure, as the story being told here must end in horrible, unthinkable tragedy. This works within the context of the original game, as these events are a catalyst to a curse that spans a millennium and ensnares a huge cast of characters into a gothic mystery. However, on its own, the ending and ultimate fate feels a bit anti-climactic. Sure, Jacopo and Morgana do have compelling reasons for becoming the characters we ultimately meet in the base game, but by necessity this tale ends in their tragic deaths without a true narrative payoff. There’s not much learned here, nor additional aspects that can be gleaned. Were the moment-to-moment writing and character work not better, it would almost feels like an edgy teen’s attempt at shock: “and then everyone died, the end.”

There’s also the aspect of Morgana’s suffering, which is deep, horrendous, and often times extraneous. Again, the problem here is structure and context - in the original work slowly peeling back Morgana’s story and how she became the which is still shocking enough, but its part of the greater overall structure feels more earned and narratively cohesive. Here, it can sometimes feel as though we are simply watching a young girl suffer, over and over again, with very little reprieve. Her trauma is also often framed around Jacopo and his attempts to break through her armor - we spend much more time in his head than hers, seemingly as an attempt to frame his ultimate betrayal as a tragic downfall. My guess is the writers knew they had a lot more legwork to make Jacopo feel sympathetic, but the result means that a story that really should be about Morgana is framed around a man who ultimately betrays her.

It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like here, but I cannot consider it anything less than a significant step down from the original game. Certainly, it’s hard to beat what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest video games ever made, but all the great character work in the world cannot save a story that feels out of place - both too long to have included in the original game without throwing off the pacing, and too narratively unsatisfying to stand on its own.

It may be inferred from the title, but The House in Fata Morgana is a work about façades; societal, emotional, physical, metaphorical, even literal. A fata morgana is a mirage, one usually spotted at sea or in polar environments, that fools the eye into perceiving an object on the horizon as having its double floating above, either copied or inverted, morphing kaleidoscopically, hovering hauntingly in the distance, obscuring both the true form, and perhaps true nature, of the object in question. Sailors of old would tell stories of ghost ships, and indeed, the classic tale of “The Flying Dutchman” is attributed, possibly, to a fata morgana. The House in Fata Morgana exists not only thematically, but structurally in this tradition, a complex, morphing work of staggering gothic fiction, each of its pieces obscuring, shifting, and later re-contextualized against its true, core form. It is easy to compare The House in Fata Morgana to a puzzle box - but I consider it something much more mysterious, seemingly defying explanation but all-too-real. It is ghost light within the marsh gas, a chanting in the mist.

You would be forgiven if you assume, as I did, even five or so hours into The House in Fata Morgana, that you are reading a somewhat basic yet competent anthology of gothic fiction. The first several hours of the game involve the player being lead through a mansion outside of time by a kindly maid who tells the story of the house’s previous inhabitants over many centuries. The tales are mostly grounded despite their romanticism, eschewing direct magic or fantasy (at least, initially) for vague notions of curses and characters that seem to reappear hundreds of years later. The magics of The House in Fata Morgana exist on the margins, the most direct elements of the fantastical being plot contrivances. These, however, are designed. Much like the façades built by its characters, these too are façades of a meta structural nature. It’s fearless storytelling, willing to spend significant portions of the runtime telling the kind of story that could easily put someone off of the wider text. These aren’t slights of hand, either - these stories are never discarded. In fact, they’re critical to the overall plot, but their structural and thematic importance will not become clear until many layers have peeled back.

If these structural flourishes served only the story, they would be plenty engaging and worthwhile on their own, but The House in Fata Morgana is not content with just these, as it uses visual novel structure to its fullest extent. Every single aspect of the experience is on theme and a vector for narrative. This is not to say that other visual novels do not use their interactivity as structure, but The House in Fata Morgana squeezes so much out of every portion of UI: a change in text-box color can elicit a gasp. A shift in portraiture carries deep meaning. There are choices in the game, and I had habitually quicksaved at each one, knowing that there are slight branching paths to the story. The game used this against me, in a moment that left me panicked, mouth agape, and yelling in my empty apartment. It’s a mechanical haymaker and one of my favorite I’ve ever seen.

The cast is relatively small, but a complex relationship network is woven between them, seemingly unrelated characters becoming deeply intertwined. Every character has something to hide, and The House in Fata Morgana uses these to elicit meaning rather than for cheap twist. As the player starts to understand the true nature of the game, a character’s façade is no longer a tiresome speedbump to understanding their inner desire and intention, but yet another palette on which to evoke meaning and to provide depth. The mask each character wears, ironically, can tell the player more about them. These lies become character within themselves - what someone tries to hide can help us understand their values, their weaknesses, their pain.

Pain is of deep importance in The House in Fata Morgana, as it is the catalyst upon which façades are created. The house is tantamount to gothic fiction, and this is no different, but if the mansion of The House in Fata Morgana can be considered a kind of prison (among many other things), the deceptions that characters weave become prisons of their own. In a way, each character has their own mansion, their own grief, pain, or circumstance working to imprison them within a role or an expectation. There are few truly evil characters in The House in Fata Morgana, as the game is much more interested in exploring the capacity for good people to do evil and the banal, human fears that lead them down seemingly irredeemable paths.

The only thing more powerful than the façades and the pain that birthed them are the emotions and truths that await beneath them. True to its genre roots, emotions are the most powerful force in the world of The House of Fata Morgana - hate can imprison, love can cross space and time. I began this piece stating that it is a game about façades, but it may be a truer statement to say that the game is about what happens when we reach beyond them and the power of letting your mask down to connect with another person. To close the self off from the world and from loved ones is to construct one’s own prison, to obscure one’s true nature from the only people who may be able to understand. It is to also invite pain and cruelty - such is the paradox of living.

I finished the true ending of The House in Fata Morgana late at night, nearly 1:30 in the morning. I knew I had work the next day but I was unable to put off seeing the story through to the end any longer. I tried to stifle my weeping as to not wake up my partner. Life often feels like a series of calibrating our façades. Constantly adjusting the level of access we allow for the people we encounter and love, learning to arrive at the correct level for genuine connection but minimal pain. This, of course, is never perfect, and to love we must contend with the classic mortifying ordeal of being known to another. The House in Fata Morgana speculates that to live openly and love fearlessly is not just the proper choice, but the only one we can make. It encourages emotional bravery in an unjust and painful world, lest we imprison and lose sight of ourselves.

 I own too many video games I haven’t played. In this series, I will be going through my backlog. The rules? I don’t need to finish the game, but I must play at least two hours, and must write my thoughts about it. Today, the black sheep sequel to an all-time classic, Deus Ex: Invisible War

Creating a sequel to Deus Ex is not something I would wish on anyone, not even most of the original development team. The classic game famously came together at the last minute and very narrowly missed its mark in several ways. Watching the Warren Spector GDC retrospective makes the game seem more like a series of miracles, despite the obvious talent and pedigree of everyone working on it. Art can be like that - a solid core with lots of ambition to weigh down the overall experience. Even Deus Ex’s biggest fans (myself included) can admit the game never quite reaches the heights of its opening level, even though the game is a certifiable classic.

Playing Invisible War makes the failings of Human Revolution (the several years later prequel by an entirely new studio) make a lot more sense, as a lot of Human Revolution’s failings are actually present in Invisible War. In an attempt to break into the console market, Invisible War trades the originals expanse (or at least, its facade of expanse) for density, and to middling effect. The technology just wasn’t there at the time to sell densely-packed spaces as inhabited and lively. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was a contemporary with a similar issue, but gets away with it by allowing cramped bars and cities to be something the player spends only a fraction of their time interacting with. In Invisible War, that’s the ballgame.

 Invisible War also lacks the player expression possible in the original, and feels more like picking one of a few paths the developers have laid out for you rather than actual creative problem solving. No discoveries like using tear gas to block lasers here. Even the universal ammo, which seems to be an attempt to reduce friction at first, winds up turning the player’s gun into a situational skeleton key, rather than a series of inventory decisions to be making at any given time.

These work in tandem to create less of a player-driven problem solving sandbox, and more of a series of hallways with static NPCs that are happy to divulge their entire life story to an armed, leather-clad weirdo who has walked into their coffee shop. Sure, in the original, characters were rather loose-lipped, but this usually reflected something about them: JC Denton was (at the beginning) an agency man, and characters reacted accordingly to his presence and were more or less willing to share their information based on how they felt about UNATCO or how intimidated they were by Denton in general. The protagonist of Invisible War, Alex D, is not an agent but rather a refugee from an attack on a secret Illuminati-backed program. Why on Earth would a business owner ask a total stranger to firebomb their competition’s store in their very first conversation? Why are members of a secret society simply walking around in the middle of the night, preaching the virtues of The Knight’s Templar to random passerby? Sure, this is a conceit of many an RPG (if people were as slow to trust in RPGs as they were in real life, no one would ever get a side quest), but the brazenness of it here makes the world feel yet smaller. More flashing signs for hallways to venture down.

I do think Invisible War is somewhat unfairly maligned - there’s nothing here so egregious that makes it significantly worse than many of its contemporaries, but it is a step down from the original in so many ways, I found myself just wanting to fire up Deus Ex for the thousandth time rather than spend any more time in Invisible War’s shoebox diorama world.

Regardless of our parents’ intent, they often pass their traumas to us. To conquer these, it’s important to understand them. The world can throw so much chaotic cruelty at a person in the course of their life that it can be difficult to ascertain meaning, which is crucial to the healing process. A marker of adulthood for many is coming to terms with one’s parent’s failings. We needn’t necessarily forgive our parents or those who have wronged us, but to put their actions into a greater context of their social and societal pressures, we can build a causal map that can help us better understand them and ourselves. Silent Hill f is about many things, but this may be its core. To heal is to understand.

The main plot of Silent Hill f is that of teenager Shimuzu Hinako, who is under immense social and societal pressure in small-town Japan in the 1960s. Her father is debt addled and abusive, and her mother seems to constantly enable and acquiesce to his behavior. After a fight with her father, she leaves home to socialize with her friends at the local convenience store. Soon after, a mysterious fog rolls in, along with an army of horrific monsters. One of her friends is instantly killed—her skin overtaken by fungus and red spider lilies, and the rest separated in the deep fog.

Half the narrative is Hinako attempting to reunite with her friends and escape the town. The other is when Hinako occasionally finds herself transported to another world, where she’s guided through horrifying challenges by the mysterious Fox Mask, whose true intentions seem unclear. Among these trials are several monster encounters, the murder of her best friends, and her own self-mutilation. The choices made throughout the game wrap these up into four potential endings (five, if you count the joke UFO ending).

After rolling credits on Silent Hill f, players may not immediately grok how important it is to replay the game at least twice. I’ll be the first to admit: I’m not a huge fan of this narrative device in games. While it can be interesting to take one of games’ greatest strengths (replay value) and weave this into the primary narrative, it often feels like a cheap shortcut to profundity. If this were an actually interesting part of the content, it would not have taken away from the story to be included in the initial playthrough of the game. Of course there are exceptions to this rule (Nier, for example, and somewhat less so route B of Nier: Automata) but I usually find this tests my patience. Despite this, Silent Hill f uses it to great advantage.

Silent Hill f takes the agony of the repetition of decision making and makes it textual. Hinako must fight the monster, kill her past, and suffer over and over again. Start from the beginning, extract shreds of new context, review the decisions that lead her here. Once more from the top. Let’s review. With each new playthrough the structure of the game remains almost the same, but slight alterations in cutscenes, new dialogue in place of the old, new journals to discover – these all lead to a greater understanding of the people in Hinako’s life. Their interiority and their perspective, which lends Hinako and the audience a new narrative understanding. The context constantly shifts, characters become sympathetic and hateable and then sympathetic again. I smiled ear-to-ear as a simple image within the last fifteen minutes of the final run helped the grand point the game was making click into place. It’s a narrative magic trick that’s based, structurally, on the way humans derive meaning from their past.

I used to be really close with my mother. My parents split when I was very young, and constantly swapping between households, I found myself much more comfortable in my mother’s home than my father’s. My mother was an interior designer and made a home of quiet, low light. As I became a teenager, we found ourselves constantly in conflict – my mother entered into an abusive marriage, which transformed that quiet comfort into a violent, paranoid, and unstable home. By the time I left for college, I found myself opting to stay as far from her as possible. When I moved back to my hometown after graduating, I rented a house around the corner from her, and would still go months without speaking to her. I spent many years in therapy discussing this dynamic, trying to untangle why it was that our relationship fell apart. Many a therapist tried to help me be OK with this.

It wasn’t until some months ago I had one of our semi-annual phone conversations in which she lamented her struggles connecting with my nephew.

“He’s such a boy,” she said. “I don’t know how to relate to him. When you were his age, you were so quiet and calm and sweet, but he’s so energetic and loud. He likes to play in mud and he thinks farts are hilarious. Your sister is upset with me because he doesn’t think his grandmother loves him.”

It wasn’t until this moment that I finally understood what drove us apart – by the time I was in my mid teens, I was becoming a man, which she could no longer relate to and no longer liked. I was becoming sexually active and struggling with my masculinity and morphing into something unrecognizable, and perhaps she resented me as I started to resemble this more than the “sweet quiet boy” she had loved. I will spend a significant amount of time, perhaps the rest of my life, trying to decide if I forgive my mother for what became of our home in my teen years, but I do understand her, and recognize her humanity in that understanding. I am hopeful that she does not repeat that same mistake with my nephew.

Silent Hill f understands the process of combing through the memories, searching the same sights, the same pivotal moments, to extract the meaning lingering on the margins. It understands, deftly avoiding the “both sides” pitfalls, the way societal and gender norms endanger and destroy families, friendships, and relationships. Silent Hill f isn’t just a bleak psychological horror, it’s the story of a flawed community trying its best to overcome the boxes they’ve been placed in by forces older than anyone can remember, of questioning tradition and growing as a people, and of mourning the lost opportunities and hoping for a better future.

The true ending to Silent Hill f, which I won’t spoil here, is probably the most positive of any of the series’ endings, as it imagines a true potential for the future of its characters. A world where the societal pressures recede and allow time to breathe, to consider, to contemplate. It’s dreary and sorrowful, but bright and mysterious, like watching the sunrise from the porch of a cabin far away, before the world wakes up and hums with possibility.

p.s. the combat is good, actually

I own too many video games I haven’t played. In a new series that will encourage me to play and finish the ones I have as well as get some writing practice, I will be going through my backlog. The rules? I don’t need to finish the game, but I must play at least two hours, and must write my thoughts about it. First up, Amnesia: The Bunker

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a game shoot itself in the foot by using a tooltip in a loading screen. Amnesia: The Bunker, the latest in the Amnesia series by Frictional Games, commits its biggest sin with the following “hint” that appears often when continuing from a save:

“You can overcome most obstacles in multiple ways. Use your wits and your brains. Experiment. If you think something might be possible to do, it probably is.”

 There’s no doubt that Frictional Games’ in-house engine has an impressive amount of interactivity across all titles, but The Bunker takes it several steps further. Unfortunately, it is still a video game, and that means there are limits to available interactions. The most frustrating aspect of this message is that it is an unforced error: the game clearly plays with the design language of Immersive Sims, something that is easily readable by those familiar with the genre and likely to pass over the heads of those that aren’t. With this tooltip, the game invites the player to experiment with things with the expectation of a level of interactivity that simply does not exist. Very early in the game, there is a cabinet with a well-worn chain blocking your access to it. Having read the above, I dragged a heavy brick over to the door, and began throwing it against the chain. The brick limply toppled off the chain, rattling the door but not opening it. I tried this several times, unsure if I was simply aiming poorly or if I had somehow encountered a bug or was using the wrong input. After wasting a few minutes on these attempts, I looked it up: sure enough, I needed a specific tool to get past this chain.

This immediately creates a friction with the player and the game: my first experiment was a failure, and thus I am less likely to learn into experimentation in the future and stick to tried and true methods. This kind of statement might sting less in a game like Deus Ex or Dishonored where saving is cheap and resources are plentiful, but in Amnesia: The Bunker, there is (mostly) one save point, and wasting a resource can be catastrophic. Simply removing that language and allowing the expectation that out-of-the-box thinking may be rewarded via environmental hints would have gone such long way in encouraging players to experiment within the confines of a more realistic expectation of interactivity.

All this said, Amnesia: The Bunker is still a massively impressive showing by Frictional. The game is a nerve shredding puzzle box, full of genuinely terrifying moments and surprising mechanical depth. From a team that has generally opted to forgo deep interactivity for the sake of mood and story, it’s a breath of fresh air to see they’ve learned all the right lessons from 2014 horror classic Alien: Isolation. Despite the tooltip fumble, this was an energizing and worthwhile kickoff to the quest to bring my backlog into line.

My partner and I spent August 10^th through August 24^th in Japan. Despite both of our insistence on trying to avoid things we deem “too touristy”, we figured it would be a huge missed opportunity to fly across the world and not do the Shibuya Scramble (before stopping to pay our respects to Hachiko at his statue nearby). You could make a rough comparison of Shibuya to Times Square in Manhattan, but even this doesn’t really work – much like the rest of Tokyo, it’s quieter than you expect (even with the constant patter of human activity and advertisements over loudspeakers). Though there’s no shortage of tourists like me taking photos of everything, there’s a palpable sense that this place still functions in a mostly practical manner when compared to Times Square, which to visit feels distinctly removed from any original purpose around the time you encounter your sixth slightly aggressive unofficial Spider-Man.

We planned a few shopping stops along our way, including RECOFan, the MEGA Don Quijote, and enough room for unscheduled places that caught our eye. I also found that the CAPCOM Store was nearby, and as a long time fan of the company, I figured checking out their official store might be fun (I learned that this, along with basically every other official gaming popup in Japan, is almost guaranteed to be a misfire). It was only our second day in the country, and for new visitors, navigating Tokyo without staring crooked necked at a map app can be a bit difficult – many street names are not visible and the vertical density of the city means that many shops, bars, and businesses that loom large in the mind are either tucked away in an alley or crammed in any of multiple floors of an otherwise unassuming gray building. We found ourselves outside the Shibuya PARCO, which people in the know may recognize as a massive shopping and event space in Shibuya, but myself having already circled the building once trying to find some sort of exterior entrance to the CAPCOM store, I missed their many advertisements on events currently going on and was completely oblivious to the nature of the space.

My partner and I agreed to split up here, as she could not care less about CAPCOM merchandise and I do not blame her. From here I made my way up to the 6^th floor – briefly distracted by the SEGA store, I made my way to the CAPCOM location before noticing that, in a small spot nearby, was the Hobonichi MOTHER store popup. I had, by pure coincidence, picked up a copy of the MOTHER 2 strategy guide from BEEP in Akihabara the previous day, so seeing a pop-up space dedicated to the series felt cosmically aligned. To my delight, it was completely packed with people of multiple generations. Fans of MOTHER with their children, people my age, and people nearing twice my age picking up (admittedly overpriced) merchandise and sharing and chuckling with their family and friends. An employee wearing a headband with Mr. Saturn’s trademark single-thread hair and bow leaned down to let a small child rock it back and forth. They laughed together. I later looked up the event information and was surprised at how close the official banner for the store was to the actual space (though I would say the space itself was smaller). I bought a MOTHER 2 shirt and took my photo with the Starman statue, and nearly continued on my way until I noticed a poster, off to the side, with the MOTHER 2/Earthbound main cast on an escalator stating: “HOLD ON NOW, YOUNGSTER! Exhibit! 8^th floor!”. I was beginning to worry I was keeping my partner waiting but considering the crowds I figured that it would have taken much longer to descend to the ground floor and let her know I wanted to see this than to just get up to the 8^th floor and check out whatever small, silly thing this probably was before heading out.

I ascended the two floors by escalator and saw the opening to the exhibit featuring the clay models of the MOTHER characters. I didn’t think much of it for two reasons: first, these were constantly used in materials throughout MOTHER and MOTHER 2’s original launch and promotional period. In the late 80s and early 90s, Nintendo often used clay models to promote its games and for use as reference when designing toys, merch, etc. While there’s tons of character in 8-bit and later, 16-bit, pixel art, it is still difficult to capture the designer and artist’s full intention. Mother is perhaps unique in that every single character in the first two games, from the main cast to enemies to minor joke characters, had a model made of it. A lot of graphical styling of this era encouraged the player to use their imagination alongside the game, but having a promotional shot in Nintendo Power or on the official guide could go a long way in gently guiding the player’s vision in the direction the designer originally intended. Most American gamers of a certain age will probably recall a particularly impactful cover of Nintendo Power first, but I would hazard a guess that second one that comes to mind would be the figures used to promote Earthbound in the states. The second reason being that, on previous floors where I found myself packed in with fans of all ages (I was really practicing my sumimasen) this floor was almost entirely empty. A small line formed at a fried food stand down the hall.

I went to the entrance of the exhibit where I asked a woman in pitiful Japanese if paying by card was OK, where she said it was and charged me ¥1800 (approximately $12) and handed me a ticket, a cardstock booklet, and a sheet of paper and gestured towards the “no photos” sign. I smiled, understanding none of it other than the “please don’t take pictures” part, and went on my way. The initial hallway leading into the exhibit was unassuming – imagine any pop up art gallery only this one had themed wallpaper over its temporary divisions, alongside iPads installed within the “walls” showing gameplay footage of both MOTHER and MOTHER 2. I turned the corner and gasped.

The room was full of displays of clay figures. The clay figures. I figured I must have been mistaken, that there was no way these were the originals tucked away on the 8^th floor of a nearly empty pop-up museum exhibit with minimal sign-posting for $12 a few blocks from the heart of Shibuya. I glanced at the sheet of paper I was handed. “Collected, for the first time, all 180 original figures from the development of MOTHER and MOTHER 2” was written in English underneath what I assumed was Japanese of the same information. I felt the blood drain out of my face.

Every character, from Ninten to Teddy to The Crow to Belch to Frankystein Mark II presented pristinely in paper mache and clay, separated from me by only a few inches of display glass. The vast majority of the figures were immaculate. Had there not been minor signs of wear (a slight chip in the paint here, a place where a brush stroke had been worn away to reveal a mistake that had been painted over at some point there) I would have been unable to believe that these were indeed original. I stood as close as I could without physically touching my nose to the display case. I could hardly breathe – to see the brushstrokes on Ness’ shirt, a small fingernail mark in the paint of the Coil Snake some 30-35 years later, here, by coincidence. So much of game production of that era is obscured, especially so considering the famously tight-lipped Nintendo. Theirs is a company that is much happier for their audience to see games only as a complete product, perfect and fully formed, and never anything else. Here was the proof of the hands that made MOTHER. Inches away from me. Lovingly preserved and all together. I stared at a line up of Plain Crocodile, Mad Duck, Worthless Protoplasm, Gruff Goat, and Cave Boy for what felt like at least ten minutes. “I must burn this into my memory”, I told myself. I did the same with a model of the Ramblin’ Evil Mushroom. I was not supposed to have taken photos, but I snapped a couple of quick ones out of fear that I might forget. I wish I had not done this. I fear I have cheapened it. The photographs do not do the level of detail justice, and I fear looking at them will replace the image in my mind. I spent approximately 45 minutes in this small exhibit, revisiting sections hoping to capture more detail in my mind that I may have missed before. Every time I got close, I felt tears welling up. It makes me emotional to think of it now.

Thinking of my partner wondering where I was and the difficulty of explaining that I had been crying over clay models in a shopping mall, I decided to leave. At the exit, another small shop sold merch that was not available in the popup, but I opted not to buy any. The event space offered a small table with sticky notes and pens, and suggested that guests draw the theme of the next exhibit, which I do not remember. Instead, what I would estimate to be about eighty previous visitors had decided to draw their own interpretations of the character Teddy, an optional party member from the original Mother, and, if the Hobonichi poll of the top 100 Mother characters is to be believed, not even a top-20 character. A wall full of Teddy sketches stared back at me with corny, 50s American greaser by way of late 80s pastiche grin. I smiled back.

I met my partner outside and tried through gasping breath to explain what I had just seen. “Oh yeah,” she said, “I saw that signage about it and almost pointed it out since I recognized it from the book you got yesterday.” There it was, on a digital display that I had probably stumbled by three times trying to find an entrance: “The Shape of MOTHER”.

Later that night, when we returned to our hotel room, I pulled the MOTHER 2 official guide out of my suitcase and out of the protective plastic. I flipped through and stared at its several photographs of the very models I had just seen earlier that day. These photographs, likely taken somewhere between late 1993 and early 1994 (the game was completed in May of 1994), when I was in my first year of life, now looking back at me, as perfect as they will have been mere hours before. In a video review of Cyberpunk 2077, critic Tim Rogers remarks that “there are two things about old stuff: one is that there’s a lot more of it than there is of new stuff, and there always will be. The other is that, a lot of that old stuff doesn’t go away. You can just walk up to it and say ‘hello’”. I cherish that I got to say “hello” to MOTHER. I cherish that it happened by complete accident. I cherish that I was guided by a series of coincidental circumstances to look out across time and stare, mere inches removed.

There are two concepts at the core of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: grief and legacy. How will the people we love be remembered by us when they are gone, and how might our grief twist and warp them, leave them as facsimiles? It’s impossible to eulogize the entirety of a person. Just as we can never truly know another, any one person’s life and legacy cannot be containerized. It’s easy for the grief to take on its own form, dilute the memory, fill in the gaps we cannot account for, distort the afterimage of the person we loved into something more palatable, something we can handle and explain. In this way our golems become more a reflection of us than the person they represent – our fears, our regrets, our desires. The farther we get from a person, either through death or by distance, the less our memories represent that person themselves rather than a construct of our own design.

I used to love Clair Obscur. It’s one of the few games the conclusion of which left me with genuine tears. I found it a deeply moving meditation on the aforementioned concepts, packaged in tightly wound turn-based RPG layers with fascinating character building possibilities and impeccable world design and art direction. The interplay between mechanics is divine, each piece of the game feeding into the other in a way few RPGs of this scale can accomplish. There are gameplay innovations so simple and so genius they seem obvious in hind-sight. Then I found out that generative AI content had been used in the game.

I grieve for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Or rather, I grieve for my construct of it. I have heard the arguments: it was just placeholder, it was left in by accident, it was always meant to be removed; the list goes on. The hard truth is that this placeholder has tainted the entire experience, rendered it all nearly meaningless. I adored the unique Art Nouveau-inspired world. How do I know that these designs and artistic choices were actually made by people? It’s impossible to know if this came from someone with a passion for these and a clear love for Nier Automata’s gothic-baroque, or if they were machine generated and iterated upon. I love the angular, asymmetrical design of Lune’s jacket, the single sleeve on her dominate hand. Was this a human choice? Impossible to know.

I want to believe that these were all human decisions, that each and every aspect of these fascinating and profound characters were deeply considered to reflect the very human-feeling people I had come to love over my 90 or so hours with the game. Much like catching plagiarism, unfortunately, I now cannot be sure that something I love was not pumped out as slurry and painted over with a human touch. Wanting to believe something doesn’t make it true. I cannot open my heart to a choice made by a machine, a flourish excreted from the statistical mean of stolen dreams. Clair Obscur’s world is full of characters who choose to struggle against a dying world, to save what remains to build a better future. “For those that come after”. How deeply cruel that it also uses a technology that contributes to cooking our planet. And for what, some environmental posters?

Nearly every generation feels as though it’s the last, but with the impending climate disaster (and the ones that are already occurring in places around the world) and world powers’ refusal to tackle it in legitimate, concrete ways, it truly feels as though we are witnessing, at minimum, the end of the world as it has been known by countless generations prior. Many writers much more adept and considered than myself have written plenty about the despair of the billionaire class attempting to replace art with “content”, designing generative machines to distribute slurry, but the most perverse aspect of it to me is that it is attempting to rob us of our humanity at this crucial moment. We live in a reality where cataclysm lurks only decades away, and machines threaten to stifle the final shout of a world we know. There is nothing more human than the attempt to translate the complex phenomena of existence into something communicable. It’s a lot like grief in this way – impossible to contain, yet we struggle.

I wish Sandfall Interactive the best in their future endeavors, and I wish them success. I hope that they reject the use of generative AI at any point in their creative process. I loved what I thought Clair Obscur was, but hate what it is – a fascinating work that is now inextricably linked to a technology that attempts to stifle the human soul for peanuts in return. I am terrified of the new world that is being shaped in front of us, though whatever humanity looks like in fifty years, they deserve to look back on the art of the moment and see a soul – something made by people in an attempt to create something true and messy and complex and full of failure. Art is made to communicate the incommunicable for those that come after. They will look back at our works and decide what kind of people we were, how we lived, and what we valued. I hope that our construct will be one of desperate and noble struggle, of compassion and humanity, of grief and terror and hope and love.

I knew from the moment Strange Darling started with a message claiming to be shot entirely on 35mm film, I was in for a rough time. It’s a horrendously desperate film, demanding to be taken seriously (if you don’t mind thank you) entirely via meaningless marketing terminology. A vapid claim to high-art auteurism all for the sake of a limp, uninspired, and obnoxious “twist” on final girl horror.

Early reactions to the film from people like Mike Flanagan (who is burning every ounce of good will I had given him from Oculus and Hush) insisted that you must go in blind, that you’ll never guess where it goes. Strange Darling shows its hand so early that I found myself waiting for the film to go somewhere truly bizarre, to turn this whole thing on its head, but it never does. You can guess it in seconds, and the reveal comes within the first act. To be predictable is barely a sin (formulas exist for a reason), but to hinge the entire pitch of your film on a twist so obvious and run-of-the-mill that you must use a shifting, non-chronological six-chapter structure to hide it, is. The film is presented this way because it’s a hollow mess trying to mask that fact for its eternal 96-minute runtime.

If it weren’t for Hanlon’s razor I’d call this film misogynist (there is an extended sequence of who, of the two leads, should be believed in the final act that’s even more eye-rolling than it sounds), but I fully commit to calling it deeply unsexy, and not because of the nature of its anti-hero. Willa Fitzgerald plays The Lady, a woman revealed to be the serial killer known as The Electric Lady (Janelle Monae should sue) who has lured Kyle Gallner (who plays a character called The Demon, sigh) into a hotel room after a long back and forth about the dangers women have to navigate in order to enjoy casual sex. What follow is an interminable scene that consistently uses “weird sex” (see: what your conservative aunt thinks kink is) as a bait and switch to convince you that Gallner’s character is about to snap and become “The Demon” that he’s been set up to be (note that while this is happening it is already painfully obvious that he is not actually a killer). It’s a gross and dishonest method to try and wring suspense out of an audience, to use consent (and consensual non-consent) as fodder for cheap attempts at an already obvious twist.

It's a shame too, because there’s lots of competent stuff in the movie. There’s great shot composition, the coloration is fantastic, and Fitzgerald and Gallner are truly bringing their A-game. It’s a shame its in service of such a terrible script. What I find most frustrating about Strange Darling is that it is playing in spaces that are deeply interesting. What does it mean to find pleasure in danger? There’s fascinating intimacy dynamics in giving someone control over you in a consensual nonconsent situation, to relinquish control and trust someone to pick up on subtle bodily queues. If this is the way one feels physically connected to another, how does one even in engage in that kind of play casually? Is it possible? Strange Darling is interested in none of this, using it only to lie to its audience. The most egregious moment is when Gallner’s character suddenly becomes more violent after he is rebuked by The Lady, disregarding her cries to stop and actual tears, only before “flashing back” to moments before in the car when she tells him to do this. It’s a complete whiff. During the scene, Gallner grabs a restrained Fitzgerald by the throat and threatens to cut her “lips to lips”. That’s intimate, that can be sexy, and instead it’s used for cheap discomfort, a punch it immediately pulls with the aforementioned flashback. While watching, I was waiting for the reveal to be that what was set up to be a cat and mouse hunter vs hunted thriller was actually a couple’s bedroom play becoming deeply out of hand, of consensual violence spilling into the real world and affecting other, non-involved people. Silly, sure, but at least there’s something to chew on there. Turns out there’s nothing but sawdust to be found.

If there’s one scene that encapsulates the entirety of this film, where The Lady has The Demon restrained and she goes for a knife. She straddles him, her body obscuring his in the shot, as she’s implied to be going to work on him with the knife. The music swells, Gallner screams, there’s squishy noises, the works. Shortly after, it’s revealed that she simply carved “EL” into his left pectoral, a deflating, nothing act that takes the only kind of penetration in the movie and lays it out like a wet noodle, a scene that suggests and escalation that never arrives, a point that is never made.

I’m beyond honored to say that I have my first Actual Byline in Unwinnable, a publication that is home to the kind of writing that I’ve always wanted to make - deep cultural dives more interested in specific, personal focus rather than keeping up with a cultural moment. To see something that I wrote at the top of Unwinnable’s page with the “featured story” tag on it feels like stumbling through the wrong door and winding up on stage with Olympians. I’m so thankful to the Unwinnable staff and especially Levi Rubeck who took a chance on a pitch from Some Guy. If you’d like to check it out, you can do so here!

Meanwhile, I’m gonna go ahead and just vibrate in the corner for a little bit. Hope to have a more substantial update soon.

Ryan

Warning: this piece contains full spoilers for Clickolding. Go buy it. It’s $3 and will take you about 30 minutes.

Strange Scaffold thrives in the margins. There’s no studio making games like them right now – each release a highly tuned experience to hone in on a distinct feeling. Many of their games sound like an elevator pitch from the highest guy in your dorm room, but there’s such care to their craft that each game feels like a promise. They really go for it – with El Paso, Elsewhere it was a dissection of addiction and abuse at the end of the world. With Life Eater, they investigated the violence of voyeurism. Even earlier releases like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs sounds like a shitpost but is knocking at something much more profound about relationships and what it feels like to love someone you can never quite understand. It’s all this that makes me a bit sad to report that their newest project Clickolding, doesn’t quite land for me.

It's a hell of a pitch – Clickolding is a game where you are trapped in a hotel room with a masked man. He wants you to click a tally counter until it gets to ten-thousand and he will pay you for an unspecified surgery that you need. He wants to watch you click it, and will instruct you on different ways to click it until he’s satisfied. If the title somehow doesn’t give it away, there’s a sexual undertone throughout all this, but it’s always kind of on the periphery. You can tell that the man (henceforth referred to as “The Clickold”) in the corner is getting some sort of pleasure out of it, but there’s never any highly explicit dialogue nor imagery. For the most part, Clickolding actually delivers on this pitch – it’s unsettling, disempowering, and even a little boring at times in ways that work. My major issue with the game is that I feel it scratches at something so much stronger, but ultimately pulls a lot of the punches.

The Clickold is a man of bizarre proportions: many people jokingly refer to him as a moose without antlers and the comparison is quite apt – the mask looks less like it’s hiding a face and more a cartoonish nose complete with bulging, bilateral extropia eyes. He wears a jacket, boots, and no gloves. The striped shirt under his jacket is spotted with rust-red stains, which might be blood or something else. The specter of violence lies underneath, but it isn’t until around six-thousand clicks that The Clickold reveals that he does indeed have a gun, shows it to you, then puts it away behind the chair once again. The gun doesn’t appear again until the very end, which at approximately nine-thousand nine-hundred clicks, The Clickold asks you to sit on the bed. He produces the gun, places it to his temple, and tells you to keep clicking. Once you reach one-thousand, he has what appears to be an orgasm, and then he shoots himself.

I think this is ultimately the game’s greatest misstep, that violence is only promised when the game is half over, and the violence is never directed at the player. If you attempt to leave the room during the process, The Clickold simply says “if you go out that door, don’t bother coming back”. Confirm, and the game closes. If The Clickold is willing to die for this thrill, wouldn’t he also be willing to kill for it?  Perhaps an outwardly violent “antagonist” isn’t what Strange Scaffold had in mind, and that’s fair, but The Clickold isn’t even all that forceful in his instructions. If he instructs you to stand in a specific spot, the game will not allow you to continue clicking until you do so. If you stand still, he simply repeats the instruction. Eventually control instructions will fade in to the bottom-left of the screen. It isn’t that Clickolding won’t allow you to disobey, it’s that disobeying doesn’t ratchet up the discomfort. The Clickold will never threaten you directly, “punish” you for not following instructions, or make you feel as though there are consequences to not listening. The game simply will not continue.

There are two main thematic sides to Clickolding, one is a theme of aging, of being too late in life to alter its course and the thrill of living vicariously through someone else, of deriving a sort of sick, jealousy-laden thrill of seeing someone do what you once could. The other is a metacommentary on skinner-box game design. The real thrill is right before you succeed, watching the number edge ever closer to the desired one before it turns over and gives you the next reward. The last few empty pixels in an experience bar.

For my money, the most powerful moment in Clickolding is fairly early on, where you reach nine-hundred and ninety-nine and The Clickold screams at you to stop. He holds out a shaking hand. He wants to savor this moment. You stare at each other in silence until he slowly falls back into his chair and tells you to keep going. It’s the first and last time the game truly surprised me – it made me wonder what would happen if I tried to click anyway, denied him his waiting, or stopped even when he said to continue. The answer is, it doesn’t let you, and he keeps repeating his instructions, respectively. I think Strange Scaffold really had an opportunity here to double down on the discomfort, to tap into something much darker that really fleshes out the thematic framing. Instead, Clickolding comes off kind of limp, an interesting proof-of-concept rather than the grand-slam the studio is normally known for.  

There’s an inherent absurdity (in America at least) to trying to make art. The gears of imperialist capitalism have a way of turning the most fundamental aspects of human expression and culture, or even, if we consider early cave paintings, the most human thing we can possibly do, into an indulgence. A side hustle. Something to be done in the shadow of The Big Important Work of lining up spreadsheet data or serving another for pennies on the dollar. This contradiction feels all the starker in a “post-COVID”, late-stage-capitalism world. Every generation assumes that they’re the last, but as we arc past the mid-point of 2024, things seem capital-B Bad in an unprecedented kind of way. This was an, I believe, misunderstood aspect of Bo Burnham’s Inside: what was mis-attributed by many as white guilt or a kind of liberal doomerism felt more to me like someone trying to find his place in a world that was working to make him extinct. How do you continue to create in a world that is perfectly happy to let your friends and family members die gasping in the back of refrigeration trucks? Is a world where millions are dying due to administrative incompetence (or, in the case of Palestine, unrepentant malice) have room for comedy? How does one “contribute” or exist in a world so fractured when the craft they’ve been honing for their entire adult (and pre-adult) life relies on being perceived and is increasingly being treated as an indulgence?

Anthology of the Killer, an anthology game project primarily by Stephen Gillmurphy, aka The Catamites, takes this contradiction, pulls it screaming into the absurd, and makes a bolder claim: Art is the only moral thing we can do. The project, developed over the course of four years beginning in 2020, is a collection of nine short narrative games (Voice, Hands, Drool, Eyes, Flesh, Blood, Ears, Heart, and Face, all “of The Killer”) that follow college-age BB, a zine maker trying to survive (both figuratively and literally) in XX City. Murder is an everyday part of life in XX City, as it is the primary export and engine on which the entire place runs. Over the course of the anthology, BB has many encounters with a singular assumed “titular” killer with a bird-like silhouette and a penchant for murdering other murderers. It becomes clear much earlier on than the project’s final act that the killer to which the title refers is likely something broader, more abstract, and more knowable than any kind of supernatural beast hunting for victims in the night.

The game itself is quite simple – as you pilot BB through bizarre scenarios, there’s only two inputs: move and interact. However, I can’t stop thinking about how the game made me feel. The anthology starts in the guts of a surreal call center and only gets stranger. Every day structures like museums, parks, apartment complexes, and universities mutate into darkly comedic murder carnivals; twisting, impossible labyrinths filled with malice, all the while BB cracks wry observations about youth and zine culture. As the scope of the series expands to include things like an entire college for murderers, one starts to question if anyone does anything other than murder in XX City. The answer is, not really. Anthology of the Killer skewers young adult zine culture almost as much as it does anything else, but it remains clear that this is a loving ribbing. Though never directly stated, Anthology of the Killer gestures at the argument that we’re accelerating towards a reality in which everyone is either an artist or a murderer.

As western capitalism moves closer towards being approximately six defense companies in a trench coat, keeping one’s labor out of instruments of death has become increasingly difficult. Last year, I lost my job at a furniture company, and having built a career as a computer guy, I found myself faced with a minefield of tech startups with blood-soaked VC money. Even seemingly unrelated companies have blood on their hands – Disney, Starbucks, Sweetgreen, Airbnb – the list of Israeli donors is endless. I don’t think it’s a reasonable or healthy exercise to judge a McDonald’s worker for trying to make ends meet, but there’s a grim absurdity to the reality that to be an American, or any member of western imperial society for that matter, is to indirectly contribute to the murder of tens of thousands of innocents across the globe. How do we disentangle this from our day-to-day lives? The answer, unfortunately, is that we don’t. You cannot dismantle a system designed to feed on the blood of the innocent with incremental change, you have to tear it out and start anew. This is, doubly unfortunately, out of the capabilities of most people.

So, what do we do? We connect with each other. We do the most human thing we can do and try to make sense of the world around us by abstracting it into something we can reach out and touch. We try and distill the complexity of experience and feeling into something just beyond words in the hopes that it reaches someone else who can say “I have felt that”. Even bad, pretentious, half-baked art is an attempt to communicate something that words cannot, a cry for connection in a sea of violence and confusion.  Everything else is basically just murder with extra steps.

   For many years the “walking simulator” genre of games has had one core flaw: moving game characters around a world is more like piloting a vehicle than actually moving around a space. Telling a narrative heavy story in games is a perfect match: they allow us to literally inhabit the characters whose stories we hear, to watch from their eyes, to have their realities reflected to us mechanically in order to feel alongside them. Despite this, many narrative games struggle with total immersion – there’s a tendency to want to remove “game-y” aspects with the intention to keep the player grounded in the story. I’ve spoken before on how designer Hideo Kojima deals with this by simply making the interaction of the form the text of the game, by having in-game characters refer to metatextual aspects, such as instructing other characters to “press the action button” or “turn off the game console”. We don’t currently have the ability to provide fully immersive story telling experiences with 1:1 motion, so one way is to simply let the characters in on the bit.

 Indika expands the possibilities of the kinds of stories that games can tell. There’s certainly a growing number of non-traditional settings and perspectives, especially in modern independent games, but few choose to use the language and aesthetic markings of video games the way that Indika does. In the game’s juxtaposition of gaming aesthetic and alternate history Eastern Europe circa late 19th century, developer Odd Meter manages to increase synchronicity with the ongoing story, not distract from it.  Indika is about many things, but the motifs of futility, faith, and reward remain consistent throughout. The game opens with the titular character, Indika, being forced out of the Eucharist by her fellow sisters for accidentally colliding with a priest after a vision (presented in pixelated, classic game format) of herself falling through the sky. After a brief stroll through the convent, Indika is tasked with filling up a barrel of water from a nearby well. Indika makes you do it. All of it. You will lower a bucket into a well, carry that bucket to the barrel, and dump the bucket about five times, moving agonizingly slowly.

   After the task is complete, the woman who gives you the task comes out of her home and dumps the barrel all over the snow. Indika is chock full of moments like this, that strip away the flashy slight of hand and present to you the reality of games as explicit text. What was all that for? This is what games do – they give us objectives that, in a real sense, don’t matter and reset upon their completion so they may be accomplished again. In another fantastic moment, Indika debates the nature of choice and free will in a world where people can be so easily compelled by external obligation. Is this really choice? Or just an illusion? Almost entirely parallel to this exact point, the game presents you with a split hallway. One continues the story – the other leads around a corner to a dead-end. It’s on-the-nose and games like The Stanley Parable were lampooning this over ten years ago, but the masterstroke is in how Indika is still deeply interested in being an honest-to-goodness narrative game. It isn’t trying to be a deconstruction or a parody, these are real thoughts, real introspection on the nature of art, and the game is fully taking advantage of the format in a way that few seem able to. 

    One of the best aspects of Indika is the points system, a running count of the number of “points” that Indika has obtained over her adventure. Collect enough points, and Indika levels up. These level ups serve only to either add a percentage chance of increasing total points collected every time one receives points, or providing a flat increase to the number of points you already have. One can intuit that these points are largely futile, especially considering the game tells you as much. However, they remain omnipresent throughout the adventure and are granted after finding small artifacts. Their true purpose, tied back into the very end of the game, comes at the very end – a large part of the narrative of Indika involves the finding of an artifact called the Kudets, which is said to be able to cure physical afflictions. At the end, Indika finds herself with the Kudets in hand, having encountered many crises of faith. The player can press a button to shake the points out of the Kudets, leveling up as much as they want. I tried to see how long the game would let me do this, and there seemed to be no end. Those points you couldn’t help but seek out? How does it feel now that they’re in infinite supply? That you can make your level go as high as you like? Just like the water barrel, the task wasn’t meaningless. It was what you felt along the way – the context and the suffering and the lessons. To expect our actions to earn us some sort of favor with a higher power, for the expectation of deeper reward or ultimate conclusion that will pull back the curtain on all the sound and fury is an exercise in futility. All we have is the now and the meaning we derive from the moment to moment lives we lead.

    2023 was a year of contradictions for the gaming industry. Many people smarter than myself have pointed out huge discrepancies in massive, successful sales periods for mega publishers that dominate the industry while an estimated ninety-thousand jobs were lost this year. Israel’s genocide in Palestine has benefited from the United States providing munitions (including white phosphorous), and video games like Halo and Call of Duty serve as propaganda arms of the United States military. At the industry’s own “Game Awards”, developers and creators were quickly shuffled offstage (except of course, for Keighley’s own favorite boy, Hideo Kojima) in favor of more skits and speeches from Hollywood celebrities. As a fan of games, it’s been lovely to be treated to so many wonderful experiences this year. It also feels like the industry is on the verge of a major reckoning – the profits keep rolling in but the foundation feels diseased and unhealthy.

All that said, let’s take a look at some of my favorite games of this year, presented in release order.

10. Hi-Fi Rush

    Something has to be said about how gutsy it is for a studio like Tango Gameworks, mostly known as a horror studio (it’s three prior major releases being The Evil Within and it’s sequel, followed by Ghostwire: Tokyo), to make its next project a bright, bouncy, comedy rhythm action game. It’s even gutsier to launch it the same day it’s announced with zero marketing lead-up. Hi-Fi Rush would deserve accolades for such a swing to begin with. What a lovely surprise then, that it’s so damned good on top of it. Adding rhythm as the central mechanic that the entire game is built around is genius – it takes the character action game and gives it an entire new layer. What’s even more incredible is how far the game takes this mechanic, providing each stage its own unique identity, challenge, and charm.

9. Vernal Edge

    For my money, the best quick measure of a Metroidvania’s quality is the delta between the verbs available to the player from moment one and the ones available at the end. It’s a testament to the challenge of designing stages and encounters that are interesting and fun when a character can only jump and attack and when they can practically fly through the stages, barely touching the ground as they bounce, parry, and chain attack across multiple screens. Vernal Edge, by this metric, deserves to stand alongside the likes of Hollow Knight and Super Metroid. The secret sauce of Vernal Edge is the commitment to character action mechanics and inputs (on a 2D plane) and movement mechanics that require consistent, precise input from the player. The protagonist, Vernal, is an endearing, prickly sort that reveals more about what she refuses to discuss with NPCs than what she does. The story is mostly told through implication, and piecing it together from the character dynamics proves to be a great hook to keep the exploration enticing.

8. It Comes in Waves

    The third release from Merlino Games (led by developer Antonio Freyre), It Comes in Waves is an atmospheric third person shooter about atonement and what we preserve. The player character is the “Outcast”, someone who has committed a grave but unknown wrong against a small community on an unknown desert planet. To repent, they must travel into the wastes to ferry a “specimen” worn on their back. Once the specimen is fully grown, they may deliver it and receive repentance. The gameplay is simple – you collect items that contribute to the specimen’s growth, and must fight off raiders while also maintaining your hydration level. If you die in the desert, the game is over and must be restarted from the beginning. It’s incredibly atmospheric, and nearly everything is left to implication and imagination. Clearly inspired by 60s and 70s sci-fi aesthetics, It Comes in Waves is a masterclass in foreboding. Despite the simple gameplay, the friction of the constantly draining hydration provides a consistent pressure – never allowing you to stray too far from your task despite the incredible formations and alien architecture half buried in the sandy wastes.

7. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

    I’m not very well-versed in visual novels, so it may seem quaint to those deep in the Steins: Gate or Umineko trenches, but Paranormasight has some of the most interesting meta-mechanical interactions I’ve seen since the original Metal Gear Solid. By fully enveloping the player and the format into the story and interactions, it creates an intensely immersive experience simply by folding the medium into the narrative itself. A fascinating, multi-layered murder/mystery tale revolving around seven key pieces of Japanese folk-lore, Paranormasight feels like watching a master magician at-work. There’s a constant sense of tension and unease, and even characters whose perspective you’ve embodied feel untrustworthy. The less said about the game the better, as going in blind is a core part of the experience.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

    I’ve already talked at length about the narrative failings of Tears of the Kingdom, but despite that blemish, I would still be lying to say it’s any less than one of my favorites of the year. I still think Breath of the Wild is better – it places more restrictions and friction on the player, which I think makes for a more interesting world altogether. What I admire most about Tears of the Kingdom is its boldness and playfulness. It doesn’t always work, and often times, can be more frustrating than fun, but there’s simply no other game with this size, scale, and budget that allows the player this level of mechanical freedom for approaching challenges. It’s the moments inbetween narrative beats that are the “real” story of video games, and Tears of the Kingdom is like a narrative factory - pumping out interesting stories constantly. It’s a game that I admire more than I like, and despite my reservations I do hope it marks a new era of Nintendo that’s less afraid to get weird with it.

5. Street Fighter VI

    There’s not a lot of thematic waxing I can do about a fighting game. It’s one of my favorite genres because they’re really about mastery – learning a set of systems so intimately that you can predict your opponent’s next move and execute on a series of commands that can counter that give yourself the upper-hand. It’s about securing your turns and denying the opponent theirs. It’s about resource management and memorization and all the other things that video games have come to be about over their 60+ year history. I’ve never been a fighting game expert but I can usually hold my own – it didn’t take me much time to climb to floor seven of Guilty Gear: Strive’s tower, for instance. What a joy then, when I booted up Street Fighter VI for the first time with twenty years of Street Fighter under my belt, selected Juri, and then proceeded to have my ass absolutely handed to me by the people online for the next several hours. Street Fighter VI is like learning to ride a bike all over again, and starting from scratch was thrilling. The fact that a 30+-year-old series can re-invent itself to this degree is a testament to the designers at Capcom and to the robustness of the format that they popularized back in 1991. I adore Street Fighter VI for making the climb fun again.

4. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

    Austin Walker said it best during his now DMCA’d tweet about the game (re-upload here) – it’s just damned good to see Armored Core again. FromSoftware, having created an entire genre of video games, returned to their beloved mech action series gloriously. Armored Core is back, and it’s louder, faster, more ambitious, and better than it’s ever been. FromSoftware took several lessons they’ve learned over the last ten years and used them to polish the formula to a mirror-sheen, bringing all the joy and complexity of building the perfect machine and marrying it to their peerless action design. Elden Ring was a phenomenal, but extensive mess, and it’s such a joy to see FromSoftware return to their restrictive, mission based design. Each arena has been fine-tuned to provide a series of challenges press the player both mechanically and creatively with each new build of their mech. The boss design is some of the best in FROM history, with thrilling, climactic, and visually stunning encounters at a tremendous scale. Armored Core VI is a triumph from every angle.

3. El Paso Elsewhere

    I’ve already written at-length about what an incredible game El Paso, Elsewhere is. It changed me. I’m a different person on the other side of this experience than I was before I sat down to play it. It’s an experience that only solidifies itself as one of my favorites upon further reflection. I find it interesting that, in the same year, we got both a modern, polished Remedy game, as well as a tribute to some of their earliest works (the original Max Payne). It’s a fantastic example of the ways that the medium has grown both in terms of maturity and ambition that these two could exist. Strange Scaffold’s masterpiece truly understands the heights that can be achieved when taking a mechanical foundation as solid as the original Max Payne and giving it the ludonarrative complexity it deserves, creating something not just in tribute but deeply personal and affecting during the process.

2. Baldur’s Gate III

    Never count Larian Studios out. It’s frankly a miracle that a game such as Baldur’s Gate III exists, considering the level of depth and complexity that’s being attempted here. The biggest issue with any game that attempts to adapt Wizards of the Coasts’ immensely popular Dungeons and Dragons system is that the best part of any Dungeons and Dragons session is the push and pull between game master and player. It’s collaborative story telling, and video games by definition cannot react to every possible player input in the way that a human being can. Baldur’s Gate III still doesn’t achieve the “true” DnD experience, but its easily the closest that any game has come. The simple amount of permutations of any given major encounter in the game simply boggles the mind. Even more incredible are the game’s depiction of intimacy. As Luke Plunkett once put it for Kotaku, video game sex generally “looks like two mailboxes clanging together”. Compounding that problem, video game relationships often boil down to enticing the character to put enough “points” into a “romance bucket” for a certain character until it unlocks some special dialogue and, potentially, a steamy scene. Then things generally go back to normal. There’s not a lot of room for relationships to feel real in video games because characters, by nature, have to remain in constant possible states for all players. Liara from Mass Effect can’t have to much work put into a romance because she’s only one of many possible romances, but because she’s also a core party member for characters that may not have romanced her. Baldur’s Gate III puts so much emphasis on each character’s relationship with the player’s own that it’s staggering. My relationship with Karlach (the plucky, awkward tiefling barbarian) actually evolved over the course of the game. What began as flirting slowly became more and more intimate. I made choices that hurt her, that made me feel terrible, that she eventually forgave me for. All of this reflected within the dialogue and the history of our relationship over the game. It’s the closest any game has come to providing me with a sense of intimacy between a player-created character and a member of the cast. It’s a truly spectacular achievement.

    Baldur’s Gate III has many issues – a heavily bloated final act, bugs, mechanical pitfalls, you name it. But I will always remember it as a towering achievement in the medium, a storytelling juggernaut, and the game that made me feel attached to a goofy, buff, tiefling.

1. Alan Wake II

    The video game industry doesn’t get a lot of stories like Alan Wake II. Remedy studios has always felt like a scrappy underdog. They make extremely tight, weird, thrilling action games that tend to struggle a bit financially. They’re almost always underrated, and in the case of the actual game not being too great (Alan Wake), you can count on them being thick with atmosphere and strong creative choices. I had written off the chance of ever seeing a sequel to Alan Wake until 2019’s fantastic Control. Even then it didn’t feel real – there was no way that Remedy was finally going to have the kind of financial stability to put together a sequel to a thirteen-year-old clunky action game about a pretentious writer wandering in the woods with a flashlight and a pistol. What a joy then, that 2023 brought Alan Wake II, which is not only fantastic in its own right and an improvement in every aspect to the original entry, but feels like the culmination of every lesson Remedy has learned over its long, rocky history. Alan Wake II took so long to make because it couldn’t have happened before now. Remedy couldn’t make Alan Wake II without first making Alan Wake, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Quantum Break and Control. And what an achievement it is. Easily the most singular vision and creatively robust experience in recent memory, Alan Wake II doesn’t feel like the work of one person (writer/director Sam Lake is certainly in the “auteur” conversation, despite this) but rather a united creative team. How incredible that Remedy has created its own “universe” which, in a post Disney/Marvel world, feels stale and tired, and make it fresh and new. See, a huge thematic core of Alan Wake II is the art reflecting back on and changing the creator. About creator reckoning with what they made. By joining their games into a single universe, Remedy allows this metatextual aspect become text. It’s so masterful in taking player expectations into account and flipping tired narrative pitfalls into huge swings that it boggles my mind. It’s something so special that it frankly defies reason, I feel lucky just to have witnessed something like it in my lifetime. 

References:

Ivan, T (2023, December 11).  It’s estimated that 9,000 games industry jobs have been lost this year. videogameschronicle.com

Plunkett, L (2011, April 8) Very Good Reason Why Video Game Characters Shouldn’t Get Naked. kotaku.com.au

Austin Walker (@austin_walker) (2022, December 9). with full respect to the actual trailer soundtrack, which whipped, please enjoy this snapshot into what my brain sounded like while the armored core 6 trailer played [Post] https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https:https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20//x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20

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    “I tell myself it was always going to be a one-way trip. That’s what love is.” is the opening line of the new project by Strange Scaffold, El Paso, Elsewhere. It stuck with me because of its truth – I’ve been fortunate to have many loves in my life and each and every one of them has fundamentally altered me as a person. I don’t look at the world the same why I used to. For better and for worse, I carry these experiences with me and they shape the decisions that I make and the way I empathize with others. Good art does something similar. It alters our worldview, changes our lexicon, provides us with a new meterstick for gauging and understanding our placement in things. In this way, El Paso, Elsewhere will stay with me too – it has changed me.

    There's a hint of melancholy in most of the output of studio Strange Scaffold. Their viral hit, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs presents as a comedy adventure game about navigating surrealist spaces and running errands for talking dogs (represented by stock-photo still images of dogs put into the game as billboard sprites), but ultimately it’s a game about two people Making It Work Despite It All. The studio’s latest offering goes for the jugular immediately – much like its hungry vampire antagonists. This surreal, weird-noir shooter is wearing its theming on its sleeve. It wants you to think about addiction as much as it wants you to slowmotion dive through a window while filling nightmare creatures full of bullets. There are moments of levity, mostly in the form of collectible radio drama snippets of the metanarrative Pill Cop, but for fifty gore-spattered stages, El Paso, Elsewhere keeps its foot plant firmly on the gas.

    Max Payne-alike is a fair description (and the developers themselves consider the game an homage to the Max Payne series), but it severely under-serves the thematic swings at play and undersells perhaps the greatest accomplishments of the team. El Paso, Elsewhere may take a lot of gameplay and tonal inspiration from Max Payne, but it also successfully takes the ludonarrative dissonance of a neo noir detective gunning down hundreds of enemies and removes it entirely. James Savage, the protagonist of El Paso, is a pill-addict. The very pills that provide the player with health and the ability to keep progressing as they take damage are the ones that are killing him. James has taken a seemingly lethal dose of pills at the beginning of the game knowing that the withdrawals will kill him painfullly. The game constantly puts the player in sync with James as well – the effect they’re having on his body is frequently referenced in the narrative, and each tap of the “heal” button has James making a sick, almost retching sound as he dry swallows pills. The health meter may refill, but there’s a suspicion that we’re only borrowing time.

    On the other side of the ludonarrative coin, El Paso’s gameplay manages to update the Max Payne formula while using it sublimely to make a point about intimacy as a whole. James’ mission in the game is to stop his ex, Draculae, from completing a massive sacrifice to regain her full power as Lord of the Vampires. As the game continues, it becomes apparent that James and Draculae’s relationship was toxic and abusive – she never physically harmed James, but always made sure that he knew that she could. It’s hard to imagine what a gun-slinging, John-Woo action hero folk lore expert/monster hunter could possibly fear, except maybe the Lord of Vampires. However, it’s not just her literal power – this gives way to a different, more personal (and possibly scarier) truth: to love someone is to relinquish some agency – to afford them a lot of power over us and trust they will wield it responsibly. James, a black male protagonist who can dive through the air with dual pistols and slay thousands of monsters of the course of the game’s run time, allows El Paso Elsewhere to drag these contradictions out into the spot light. James is physically capable, confident, and funny. He cracks jokes to mitigate his discomfort with the situation and congratulates himself when he downs a room full of monsters. He’s also the victim of terrible abuse. What can feel like a contradiction on the surface reveals a deep understanding of the dynamics of power in relationships, especially with relation to traditionally “masculine” men.

    While the “one way trip” revenge story is well-tread ground, El Paso, Elsewhere frequently surprised me in the likeability and charisma of its protagonist. Where many stories of this nature feature protagonists who are searching for a reason to live, El Paso feels like a story of a man who is frequently looking for an excuse to die, and yet his mission continues to reveal to him reasons he shouldn’t. Upon player death, the game repeats the adage “YOU KEEP GOING” before immediately dropping the player back into the last checkpoint. With no chance to accept or quit, it started to feel less like an inspiring adage to encourage the player, and more like a truth, a cast die. You don’t quit here. It isn’t over. You keep going.

    The game begins with James pulled over on a desert highway to a motel in the middle of El Paso, Texas. He breaks the fourth wall and asks us, the player, to believe in him. Moments later, we’re behind his shoulder as he guns down armies of monsters and rides an impossible elevator down to hell, located in a surrealist void inside a motel. It’s a big, high-concept check to cash, and while I think Xalavier Nelson Jr. (head writer and creative director, as well as voice talent for James) is certainly the kind of creator who likes playing in these spaces – these aren’t unconsidered. I do believe in James – he excites me, makes me chuckle, and even disappoints me. All the way to the tragic conclusion he feels real, considered, and extremely human. To believe in James means to believe that we are capable of inflicting pain, but that we can grow and be better. That we are not chained to the roles expected of us, that we needn’t grow cruel with time. I can’t say for certain what kind of person I would be if I hadn’t played this game, but I now know that every time I engage with art; real, honest art, it’s a one way trip. I’m a different person at the end, and that’s a trip worth taking.

    It’s been about two months since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the general consensus appears to be that the game is a triumph. I would mostly agree with this - there’s definitely a feeling of the game straining under its own weight with less-than-ideal controls, some uninspired dungeon design, and typical frustrations that come with collectathon crafting systems (the great faerie armor upgrade system is startlingly bad, as it forces the player into a dull collectathon that runs counter to the joys of the game), but my many nitpicks amount to a proverbial molehill compared to the towering achievement that is the rest of the game. I’m in awe of its bravery - Breath of the Wild pointed to this with its more open-ended approach to puzzle design, but Tears of the Kingdom takes that approach to its logical endpoint. To provide the player with means of breaking the game entirely as a primary tool is nothing short of a miracle, especially considering Nintendo’s often conservative approach to game design. Nintendo games very rarely allow players the kind of expression that allows them to intentionally break and think outside of their predefined boxes (wondrous as those boxes often are). Nintendo games are exceptional at letting the player feel like they’ve done something unintended, yet providing a cheeky smirk (think Super Mario Odyssey’s invisible coins) to let you know that someone, somewhere intended for you to be able to Do That. Tears of the Kingdom is the first time this illusion has not maintained itself. Even in a game that encourages you to break it, there were several times throughout my 90+ hours that I thought to myself “they did not expect me to do that.” 

    I’m less interested in retreading the same ground of whether or not the games are a success in terms of mechanics (they assuredly are, in many ways), but rather, how the games fumble their narrative opportunity around technology, especially in relation to warfare. To be fair, The Legend of Zelda series has never had its narrative sights set too high - the most narratively bold games in the series were often due to tone (Majora’s Mask) or the declaration of a specific place in the “timeline” (Skyward Sword). This is not to say The Legend of Zelda narratives are bad overall, just that they are very functional. The series is much more interested in providing players with moment-to-moment reveals and gameplay challenges as notable moments rather than narrative ones. 

    My hopes changed with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. When the game made it clear that so much of the baggage of what makes a “traditional” Zelda game had been shed, I was immediately excited at the narrative possibilities. They even have voice acting now! Maybe they can really do something interesting here! Unfortunately, the story in Breath of the Wild is better than a lot of the series, but still mostly nothing special, and I would say somewhat middling in an artform full of middling narrative. What I found most disappointing, however, was the treatment of technology. “An ancient civilization has left us technology that we fully don’t understand and use at our peril” is a nauseatingly common trope in video games. Even EA’s latest Star Wars video games use this trope despite having nearly fifty years of storytelling to lift from. Breath of the Wild does this too; however, one of the less common twists on this trope is that the technology turns on the characters at a critical moment, dooming them to the state of the world that Link wakes up to in the early hours of the game. I thought it was a great sign of things to come - here is a technology that our hero is ultimately reliant on (the “sheikah slate” for example, acts as the main menu and map), but carries the weight that it once turned on our heroes in their hour of need. How will they get out of this pickle? The answer, damningly, is that they don’t need to worry about that. The same giant, ancient mechs that turned on them one-hundred years ago simply work this time because Link goes and beats the bosses inside them. They just don’t get turned this time. They use the technology and win. End of story. The idea of “the ancient machines of war that were used against us Just Work this time because we wanted it bad enough” is lazy, and under serves what could be a really interesting plot beat. What if Link were forced to face Ganon alone? What if it were up to Link to recruit the people of Hyrule to rise up together? What if they had to find a new solution? 

    It’s nothing new to tell a story (nor in recent history - just look at the increasingly militarized United States police force) in which vast, overpowering military technology that was once used to dominate those outside a nation’s borders is now turned on the people within. This is a common theme in cautionary tales - put your faith not in governments that use weapons of mass destruction, as it’s only a matter of time until those weapons are turned on the people who deem that their rights have been impeded upon. The idea that these ancient weapons of dubious intent not only work this time but only work because “we wanted it badly enough” works to undercut the potential of the framework of the narrative that Breath of the Wild presents.

    When I started Tears of the Kingdom, I truly didn’t expect anything in terms of narrative. I was truly looking forward to the game as a mechanical set piece. How would the developers that changed the conversation around open world design do it all over again? I was dragged back in when, early on in the game, Link is assaulted by robots called Zonai Constructs (once again, inventions of the even ancient-er race that predates the Shekah and everyone else that has settled in Hyrule). Only this time, the idea that the Zonai Constructs are attacking Link is unexpected by one of the people who built them - early in the game, Link is accompanied by a mysterious spirit who tells him that this wasn’t their intended function. They were supposed to assist in times of great peril, they had planned for this, what was going on? I was immediately grabbed - here was a narrative that was specifically in conversation with what came before it. Now the hook was going to be about the price of building and using machines of war - especially ones that we don’t fully understand, to defeat an encroaching evil. 

    I was even excited for the narrative implications of building being a primary mechanic - with Link’s left arm being severed and replaced with the “ultrahand”, he can now construct new weapons and devices previously unthought of. While I don’t know that the developers intended necessarily to comment on players doing things like building automated drones, I was excited for the narrative possibilities of what all this building might do to the world around it. Would Link’s inventions eventually turn against him like the Zonai’s had to them? The game contains a mechanic for “remembering” the constructions that you’ve made. What if these suddenly are used against you in the end, making you consider the fact that you’ve potentially created weapons to wage war against an enemy without considering what happens when those are pointed back at you? What if you, the player, suddenly started seeing your inventions used to terrorize the people of Hyrule because you had been building terrifying weapons without considering the consequences? What if the final stretch has you face the most nightmarish of your creations on the way to Ganondorf? 

    Unfortunately, none of this happens. It’s a shame too - because again it feels like an obvious narrative gesture that just… never gets capitalized on. There is a part of me that wonders if criticizing the narrative of a The Legend of Zelda game is like criticizing a dog for not knowing perfect English, but I argue that these kinds of narrative swings could really make the package feel “complete”. See, I maintain that the narrative of Tears of the Kingdom, much like Breath of the Wild, is fine. I even personally found the ending the most effective in any entry in the franchise (I’m lukewarm on that take and it may be the recency bias talking, but it’s certainly up there). There is, unfortunately, a distinct feeling of the narrative being somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game. The main objective of “find Princess Zelda” is driving most of the plot of the game, but the actual plot threads occur in flashbacks the player can find throughout the world (much like Breath of the Wild). The missed opportunities hurt so much more here because there was a golden opportunity to weave narrative and mechanics into one another seamlessly, to let the player feel like their actions had consequences. I don’t think that the narrative needed to necessarily veer into “Link is the Bad Guy Actually” territory, but something to ground the verbs that the player spends most of the game engaging with (building, experimenting, etc.) into the narrative writ large would have gone a long way. It’s doubly disappointing that the ultrahand abilities are more or less absent from the final encounter - they’re usable, sure, but they aren’t required in any meaningful way. I was able to run to and beat the final boss without ever once using an ultrahand ability, and that’s a shame considering how much of the game I spent coming up with various contraptions.

    The Legend of Zelda has so much baggage from previous incarnations, player expectations, narrative hang-ups (Nintendo giving in to fans and establishing an official timeline is a choice they will come to regret, I imagine), it’s practically impossible to appease everyone. I truly admire the mechanical swings that Nintendo takes, and knowing that Breath of the Wild has introduced the “new” era of Zelda as we currently know it, I hope that Nintendo continues to prioritize bold, interesting mechanical swings. I do hope, however, that they allow some of that boldness to seep into the narrative as well. There’s so many interesting opportunities with the series as a cultural object and as a means of reckoning with the past and its influence on future generations, I hope that the next time we visit Hyrule, some more consideration is given to these aspects.

    It's hard to distill my feelings about a property like Metal Gear Solid. On one hand, it's my absolute favorite series across any medium ever. Playing the PS1 original at five years old has informed my taste, my world view, some of my politics, even my love of antagonistic art. Metal Gear taught me to stop expecting to be gratified by creators and instead to be challenged by them. On the other, Metal Gear is also misogynistic, childish, and expects the audience to take characters named things like Hot Coldman very seriously. This juxtaposition is nothing new in criticism of the series, and I expect that many people intimately familiar with the series struggle with the dichotomy of how seriously they take these games vs. how ludicrous so many aspects of them are. At this point, I refuse to apologize for the more ridiculous nature of Metal Gear or try to convince skeptics that it's Good Actually and worth serious artistic consideration that a wine-drinking fatphobic caricature takes up several hours of runtime in my personal favorite entry, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. See, the important part isn't that Metal Gear Solid is Good Actually (it is) or that it's stupid (it is), but that the impact the series has had on me as a human is profound, valid, and worth consideration.

    There exists a consistent (and fairly large) subset of video game fandom and marketing that continues to try and make them a "prestige" art form. If only we add enough camera angles, serious acting, and visual fidelity to our games, they will be taken seriously as art and stand alongside the Citizen Kanes and Kind of Blues of the world - serious art for serious people that must be respected. I don't intend to imply a disdain for any "prestige" video game (I've been known to enjoy a Last of Us or God of War from time-to-time) but I find myself, these days, much less interested in convincing the unconvinced. Video games needn't be prestige to be worthwhile, and to be worthwhile does not require prestige. Play is a core part of the human experience - something that, as we grow older, we stray away from less due to necessity, but still core to our identities as humans. These moments in games that illicit emotion in me matter for having been experienced, they need not be universal or potent to all potential passerby in order to meet a vague definition of "value".

    On May 24th, 2023 Konami announced a remaster of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (called Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater because giving a sensical name to a Metal Gear game is against the spirit). I turn thirty years old on May 26, 2023. Twenty years ago, I experienced Metal Gear Solid 3 for the first time after religiously playing the Japanese-language demo from Playstation Magazine on my Playstation 2. I still remember the way the actor Banjō Ginga (Major Zero) says "backpack." I remember the anticipation of an all-new Metal Gear Solid, having played through Metal Gear Solid 2 more times than I can count. I remember the dread of not knowing if the voice of Snake would be same (since, isn't this the guy Snake was cloned from?). I remember the new, grounded feeling of the cutscenes, like I was somehow accessing something more mature, more "advanced" than previous entries.

    Watching the announcement of a remake of a twenty-year-old classic that impacted me greatly two days before my thirtieth birthday makes for an intense moment of clarity of the passing of time. I do wonder what the team at Konami hopes to achieve with remaking Metal Gear Solid 3. Hideo Kojima's design philosophy often involves making games that squeeze every drop out of their included form factor. His studio's creative process is much more physical than that of many other game developers. This process makes the Metal Gear Solid games such distinct products of their era - they often reference their platforms directly in dialogue. The Metal Gear Solid games pull the player in by making the separation explicit - the player takes on the role of Snake so he's in on the bit. When you press the select button to accept a codec call, Snake is pressing the select button too. I often wonder if the industry's recent obsession with remasters and remakes is an attempt to capture this "prestige". Look at the fidelity! See how amazing these games are now that they look more realistic? Isn't this a Product Worthy of Respect now? Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space, and Metal Gear Solid 3 - these games need no additional prestige because they are already monumental forces that have altered the trajectories of lives and provided invaluable and incalculable impact to countless lives.

    By increasing the visual fidelity of Metal Gear Solid 3, what is gained? How is it improved? Am I less aware I'm playing a video game? I doubt that's possible when a character states aloud that Snake “should watch his stamina meter". Is that something I even want? I would argue no. I knew when I watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On that I was watching an anthropomorphized shell in a film, but I wept all the same. Profundity relies solely on emotional connection, which can be made with anything if the art is honest. I wish the developers of the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake the best of luck, and I hope that they are being paid well and treated fairly. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious about what they produce, but it will always feel, to me, like dishonesty. It's time to start being honest about what games are. It's the only way they'll ever matter.

   Author's note: while concrete story spoilers are not discussed in this piece, many of its themes and motifs are. I personally recommend playing through Signalis in its entirety before reading, as it is best experienced first-hand.

  What is hell? There exist almost as many answers as there are people. Of course, many theologians and philosophers have popularized certain visions or states of hell, though a common one in games (and one that lends itself to the form quite well) is limbo – existing endlessly in a space of not-quite-dead-yet-not-quite-alive, doomed to endlessly wander and repeat the same cycles over and over while slowly growing mad. In Signalis, the new psychological survival horror from two-person team rose-engine, hell may be many things, but it’s almost certainly something of our own design. Signalis is a “classic” survival horror set in a remote mining facility far outside of our own solar system. The game draws on a kaleidoscope of influences both aesthetically and thematically, ranging from surrealist/psychedelic horror of the 60s and 70s, as well as classic cosmic horror (the specter of Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers especially hang over this work), and even soviet-era propaganda and technology. The player takes control of Elster, an LSTER model combat replika (a type of android reminiscent of a replicant from Blade Runner) who wakes up on a crashed scouting ship in the middle of a frozen wasteland. She dons a protective suit and heads out into the frozen wastes, only to soon after descend into a fleshy pit, crawl through a hole, and pick up a copy of The King in Yellow, before suddenly finding herself staring in a mirror of the bathroom of this abandoned facility. She has a photograph of Alina (or was it Ariane?) and knows that she must find this person. The rest of Signalis’ journey is a winding fever dream that requires the player to put together the pieces to solve a mystery both cosmic in scope and deeply personal. I often thought of Kojima Productions’ PT during my time with the game, in that, while the game’s maps are often winding, even nonsensical and impossible spaces, the general thrust of Elster’s direction as she explores is down. Descending both physically and metaphysically into deeper layers of a nightmare of flesh and decay, through further and further circles of Hell.     In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Agent Philip Jeffries states that they are living inside a dream. In Twin Peaks: The Return, this idea is expanded upon with addition the question: “but who is the dreamer?” Signalis makes the argument that perhaps it’s better off not to know, that perhaps knowing is its own kind of hell. Without getting too deep into spoilers (though, it’s almost impossible to spoil Signalis’ story in the sense we often think about), the logic and feeling of dreams pervades the entirety of Signalis’ run-time. Impossible spaces, characters and relationships that feel like disjunctive cognition, and the inability to make chronological sense of certain events (in some cases, this is a tool leveraged by the storytelling, in others, it’s a classic paradox of an event inciting itself). The most impactful on me, however, was the sense of familiarity. Signalis wears its many influences brazenly on its sleeve, to the point that I initially found some of them a little too on-the-nose (the prevalence of the “Kubrick Carpet” for example, an easter egg that many games are all too eager to shoehorn in). However, as my time with the game continued, they began to have an incredible metanarrative effect – they made Signalis’ world feel familiar while it grew more grotesque, horrifying, and alien by the moment. I could pick out obvious homages to Neon Gensis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, the list goes on, but fascinatingly it began to put me in a headspace that helped me identify with Elster. I haven’t seen these halls before, but they remind me so clearly of spaces I had been. Was it really my first time here? I’m not sure if this is the intended reading for these homages, or if it’s just rose-engine wanting to pay tribute to the works that inspired them, but I can’t deny that it wound up working for me in a stunning, unexpected way.     What makes me so certain that these inclusions are more than just references is the intenionality of Signalis’ design. Every HUD element and mechanic have in-universe explanations or representation. For example, a propaganda poster extolling the virtues of keeping only what is needed (no more than 6 items) reinforces the game’s six-item limit. rose-engine has clearly thought a lot about consistency in Signalis, and it is this commitment that gives the entirety of the game, and its narrative, a level of cohesion that is not often seen in the indie games space. 

    Even without this abstract examination of dreamlike horror and visual metaphor, Signalis has many delicious, blood-soaked layers to entice just about every fan of cosmic and sci-fi horror. Signalis has much to say about the subjugation of bodies under authoritarian regimes and that way that, even under traditionally “noble” story setups (how many stories have been told where the scrappy rebellion flees from the overreaching empire), there are real flesh-and-blood costs to the people whose lives are entangled in the politics of nations that do not care for the individuals that make them up. The many replikas that make up much of Signalis’ cast are revealed, somewhat early in the game, to be copies of an original “gestalt” (implied to be more of a “normal human” than a replika), leading to psychological profiles that can be, disturbingly, accounted for and “optimized” for the best operation of the replika unit. Signalis isn’t interested in “are androids people?” - the text makes it clear that they are deserving of the same respect and personhood that we assign each other – but rather the way that political systems treat humanity as disposable. There’s further layers to this horror: imagine you one day found that you had an operator’s manual – a full print of your likes, your fears, your insecurities, your faults, and how to best account for these in order to have you “operate” at your best? If someone can account for your every move, to “optimize” you, what does that say about free will? Signalis is packed with this subtle, abstract horror. It creeps into the back of your skull and percolates into a rolling boil.   Signalis is about so many things, but it remains grounded in core themes about relationships. The bonds we form with one another are stronger than government, than revolution, and with a little eldritch assistance, time and space itself. I am utterly captivated by Signalis – I too, now, feel bonded with this work, this dark narrative that has burrowed into my subconscious. I want to peel back all the layers of this world, to put a microscope to every corner of it. Perhaps that’s rose-engine’s last gift to me: though the game’s four possible endings all bring their own thematic gut punches of closure, the threads of the literal goings-on with Signalis’ world remain tantalizingly incomplete. Whether or not rose-engine decide to revisit this universe or bring us along to a different one, I can count them among the studios I watch with great anticipation.

     Sometimes when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?

                                                    - From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

This post contains spoilers for some of the endings of Citizen Sleeper. If you do not want to know any endings, I recommend completing at least one playthrough before continuing.

This post also contains discussion of body image, dieting, and scars.

 Mere moments after starting Citizen Sleeper, the new sci-fi TTRPG-inspired game by Jump Over the Age, I knew how I wanted my character's story to end. See, I've become a big fan of making the choices in games (at least, the ones that allow for capital 'C' Choices) that make me most uncomfortable or uncertain. I have found that, after a lifetime of playing story-based games and making incalculable choices across myriad flavors of RPG, the ones that fill me with dread, that leave lingering questions about the state of the world,the ones that make me question my own worldview are the ones that stick with me longest (see: Nier Automata's ending E, Pathologic 2, Paradise Killer, etc). As someone that has struggled with lifelong anxiety around death and dying, the loss of physical form, of the self, is something I find specifically terrifying. Despite my own struggles with depression and mental illness, at the end of the day, I do love to have an experience.

    When it became abundantly clear that Citizen's Sleeper's core tension was that of having a debilitating physical ailment and struggling to survive under cruel, space-station capitalism, it felt like I would ultimately get the choice to leave my body behind at some point, and I just knew that that would be the ending for my character that would leave me with that bubbling discomfort I craved. We spend so much time clinging on to our humanity despite the struggles of physicality, what could be scarier than leaving that behind? 

 Citizen Sleeper casts the player as the titular "Sleeper", an emulated consciousness. At some point, someone had entered a contract to enter a sort of brief hibernation, during which their brain (sans memories, personal identity, etc.) was copied, emulated, and placed into a corporate-owned artificial body. With this body, the corporation can extract labor from a specialist without any of the baggage of that pesky personhood getting in the way. The Sleeper will awaken in the new body without any idea of who they are or what kind of person the progenitor of their consciousness was, but equipped with a disposition towards specific skill sets and all the long-term memory of an adult (think Severance but without the body-sharing). What's special about the player's Sleeper is circumstance - they've somehow escaped the clutches of the corporation that owns them and have found themselves on The Eye, a space station undergoing its own power struggle with its own network of folks trying to survive and make ends meet. In Citizen Sleeper's world, the Sleepers don't necessarily need to eat in the way humans do, but they were designed to do so anyway. The Sleepers may be humanoid, but retain other humanoid needs only in ways that can be exploited by capital. How can you motivate a worker without base needs? How can you force labor out of someone who doesn't go hungry, or can't feel physical pain? It is these needs and building the connections to satisfy them that draws Citizen Sleeper's base story. At first, it was getting the food that would allow my Sleeper to be able to do basic tasks, then the stabilizer that would keep my body from falling apart.

    The body of The Sleeper is not only a core tension, but a vehicle for storytelling. Despite Citizen Sleeper's relatively simplistic graphical representation (there are no cutscenes or animated events, the entirety of the game is a macro-level view of the station with character art during dialogue sequences), the team at Jump Over the Age have put a truly remarkable level of effort into the writing to create a rich world. Though much has been left to the imagination, the details bring the events of The Eye to life via incredible prose, leaving me with vivid mental images of my Sleeper's entire journey. The story of my Sleeper isn't just in their work, it's also in collapsing into a shipping crate from a hard day's work in the ship yard, or, out of desperation, piecing their failing body back together with whatever scrap could be pilfered from the market on The Eye. When I think of my Sleeper, I think of the modifications made to their body to become more adept at engineering, altering their physical form to learn to leave food behind in favor of photosynthesis, or the damage they took from security when trying to slip past to install worm software on one of the station's security terminals. 

    It's given me pause to think of my own story, told by the changes and marks on my body. The scar on my hand given by an faux suit of armor in a second-hand store at nine years old. My slightly angled, barrelled chest that a doctor once looked on with concern and stated that it might require surgery via breakage and resetting if it didn't even out (it did, thankfully). The stretch marks on my legs from my phase of dieting and intense running. The myriad tattoos that can teleport me back to places in time, acting both as memento and snapshot - a haiku of a lived experience. I've never liked my body - it feels simultaneously angular and doughy, broad chested with wide hips that make most men's clothing feel difficult on me. I have navigated much of my life feeling simultaneously massive and small, taking up an impossible amount of space while feeling comfortable in none of it. I have never had the feeling of seeing a piece of clothing and feeling it fit exactly how I imagined - either swallowing up too much of me or showing too much of that which I hate about myself for me to feel comfortable. I have often, half jokingly, mentioned that I would prefer to be a floating head or a formless orb, still able to participate in socializing and activities I enjoy, but without this lumbering flesh making me feel too embarrassed to exist in any space where too much of it is visible. All of this to say, as someone who greatly fears death (I used to have panic attacks as early as six years old, contending late at night with the concept of death and permanent loss of consciousness), I only begrudgingly accept that the price for sentience in 2022 is to do so via a body I would love to modify more aggressively than skin-deep. 

     I was immediately surprised at my knowing that I was going to go with the ending of Citizen Sleeper that would make my Sleeper leave behind their body to become something else, to, as the achievement indicates, grow vast and strange. I pressed through various storylines -- My Sleeper helped a Doctor topple a corrupt gang, helped a cafe get back on its feet, helped a father and daughter escape in hopes of a better life, all while continuing to choose to stay behind. One by one the connections they had formed and become so endeared to severed, until finally they found themselves in a commune at the edge of the station, an impossible space teeming with plant life, an oasis of growth in the vastness of space. My sleeper became a pillar of this community, until a series of events brought them in contact with a seed that gave them an audience with an artificial intelligence called the Gardener that allowed them the choice to sever their connection with their body and join a "chorus" of programs. Something entirely new, strange, alien, but warm and welcoming. It took me about half an hour of thinking to make this decision. Not because of discomfort with the idea of my Sleeper leaving their humanoid body, but because I knew that, clutching the now lifeless hand of the Sleeper was Riko, a warm, kind woman who tended to the physical garden of this section of The Eye. I thought of the connections my Sleeper has made over their journey, of the communities they built, and the friends they made. I also thought about the need for stabilizer and maintenance. Was I dooming them to an untold amount of suffering just because I didn't want to leave their friends behind? I decided to have my Sleeper return to their body. I thought about this decision for days.

    The way we talk about disability, at least in the Northern American West, is deeply flawed. Too many stories, often written by able-bodied people, are about surpassing the human form to transcend some sort of disability or to "recover" what was "lost". Citizen Sleeper is not nearly so cruel. It's a deeply empathetic work that understands that much of the hardship that comes from a disability is an economic system that exploits the bodies and needs of people to extract profit. While deciding to become something new altogether is by no means a bad end, Citizen Sleeper bets on a different horse: what will save us is what also makes us the most human - our desire to help each other, to build community, to reach out to another's hand, and squeeze.